Best Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville, political philosopher

Alexis De Tocqueville is the thinker of modern democracy, representative in large and multi-cultural States. Regarded as a sociologist, Tocqueville had actually conducted a descriptive philosophy of liberal democracy. Tocqueville’s opinion are keen on main democratic items : public opinion, association, tyranny of the majority, individualism. Tocqueville, for all these reasons, should be read again.

Tocqueville and freedom:

– “People want equality in freedom and if they can not get it, they still want to slavery”

Tocqueville and Equality:

– “There is indeed a male and legitimate passion for equality which excites men to want to be all strong and valued. This passion tends to elevate the rank of major small, but it also occurs in the human heart taste depraved for Equality, which is low in wanting to attract high levels, and reduces men to prefer equality in servitude to inequality in freedom ”

– “When inequality is the common law of a corporation, the strongest inequalities do not strike the eye, and when everything is pretty close to that level, the slightest injury. That is why the desire equality always becomes insatiable as equality is greater ”

Tocqueville and individualism:

– “Individualism is a feeling which disposes each citizen thought to isolate themselves from the mass of his fellows so that, having created a small company for its use, he willingly leaves society at large itself ”

– “Individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to grow as conditions equalized”

– “Individualism is a recent expression of a new idea was born. Our fathers only knew about egoism”

– “The Passion of material well-being is essentially a passion of the middle classes”

Tocqueville and political power:

– “Above the citizens arose immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild”

– “The fear of disorder and the love of well-being are gradually democratic nations to increase the attributes of the central government”

– “One point does make me believe that a Liberal government, energetic and wise, can never get out the votes of a nation of slaves”

– “I hope the legislature takes care of itself deprive the men of their independence, they are almost happy ‘

– “The State represents more daily, next to, around, over each individual to assist, advise and constrain”

Tocqueville and the Revolution:

– “All that the Revolution did, would have done, I doubt not, without her, she was a violent and rapid method with which it has adapted to the political state social state, the facts to ideas, laws manners ”

– “In democratic societies, the majority of citizens do not see clearly what it could win a revolution, and she feels at every moment, and a thousand ways, it could lose”

– “The great revolutions that succeed, by eliminating the causes that produced them, thus become incomprehensible by their own success”

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